Cure For Hiccups

Joint military exercises. Mine accident. Accusation … and subsequent denial of ‘slanderous concoctions.’ Leaflet balloons and loudspeaker propaganda. Incoming artillery. Counterfire. Bellicose rhetoric. Buildup of forces on both sides of the border. Calls for restraint by anxious allies. Protracted high-level dialog at the traditional village location.

It’s another sweltering August in Korea, and very few people in the Western Hemisphere seem to actually care.

What does it all mean? How did we get to the brink of peninsular war this time? Is there a link to China’s devalued yuan? Did Kim Jong-un lose most of his People’s Democratic Plunder in the Shanghai stock market?

Perhaps not. In my view, Korea’s August 4 DMZ mine blast (and subsequent saber-rattling) may have been indirectly triggered by the purge of DPRK Army chief Hyon Yong Chol earlier this year. The hypothesis: North Korean special operations troops loyal to Hyon planted mines in the DMZ in an attempt to destabilize the Kim clique by provoking a military crisis with the ‘Park Geun-hye puppet gang’ (South Korea).

The reasoning: In North Korea, it’s definitely not safe to directly protest the removal of a superior in the patriarchal hierarchy. But one can’t be readily criticized for striking the imperialist stooges in the Silla Kingdom –after all, that’s exactly what the Great Leader commands on just about any given day. So, from this perspective, a tactically successful military provocation that is strategically inconvenient for Kim Jong-un might constitute the 21st century equivalent of a grassroots petition to the imperial court for redress of an injustice. A cry for help, as it were.

But what sort of a cry for help? And to whom is this plea directed? Perhaps not to Kim Jong-un. It’s just remotely possible that some segments of the North Korean military are actually begging to be invaded by their brother warriors in the south, asking to be liberated from the insatiably bloodthirsty, parasitic Kim dynasty. They must truly be desperate: things could get ugly when the collaborationist Saenuri gang discovers how little remains to be stolen north of the 38th Parallel.

For now, Koguryo warriors will have to bear the unbearable and ‘eat bitterness’: Park Geun-hye has proven willing to settle for an expression of ‘regret’ rather than an outright apology, so there will be no war tomorrow. Maybe next time. It’s a scenario that bears watching: North Korea’s military deliberately starts a war that it intends to lose, in order to ensure regime change that it believes can be accomplished no other way.